Rupert Christiansen’s City of Light opens on the evening of 5 January 1875, with the inauguration of Paris’s new opera house, designed by Charles Garnier ‘in a style of unabashed grandeur’, with its gilded and mirrored salons, shimmering candelabra and marbled colonnades, mosaics, statues, frescoes and ‘flaming gas torches enhancing a central stairwell that turned the ascending and descending audience into an impressive spiralling spectacle’.
The building had been under construction for almost 15 years at vast cost and symbolised the extravagance of the Second Empire, a period in French history which lasted for 18 years, from Napoleon III’s coup in 1852 to the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. A week before the ceremonial opening of what is now the Palais Garnier, the 36-year-old architect, chosen by Baron Haussmann to build the magnificent opera house, had ‘formally handed the 1,942 keys to the management’. It is attention to such detail that makes this witty, erudite historical essay on Paris’s Haussmann years such an evocative read.
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